Just curious because I don’t see people talk about it a lot.
17 here, my grandparents used it before switching 1-2 years ago. Can’t imagine the ads are any better that less people watch it and staticy stations were annoying.
I myself don’t watch TV that much, mainly YouTube or music. In the last month I’ve watched ~3 episodes of impractical jokers on the family TV, and 8 episodes of South Park on my Steamdeck before bed.
The transition from analog to digital really hurt my desire to watch OTA TV (you caught me! I’m not under 25).
With analog broadcast, any weak signal or interference produced a little bit of static, but you could still see and hear what was being said. With digital, any weak signal means dropped frames and silence or weird glitches. You completely lose what’s happening. Even with a powered antenna, I have frequent issues with weak signal. I could probably try to get a rooftop antenna installed, but there’s no guarantee it would be any better. It’s just easier to find other entertainment at this point.
Ditto. We went from having five channels, one snowy on a bad day, plus a bonus 6th channel when the stars aligned, to two channels at best.
The broadcasters and regulators took a basic fact about digital signals “We can get a better quality signal with less transmission power” and saw it as a challenge to set up their digital transmitters with the most conservative estimate of minimum power required. I haven’t studied well enough for my amateur radio exam to know if I’m comparing apples to oranges, but I’m still shocked to see descriptions of transmitter power go from 100kW in one case to below 20kW.
I hear that. We have an attic yagi aimed directly at Seattle from 10 miles away, and we still get the occasional dropout even on our strongest signals.
Still when it works, it works really well. We watch Nature and Nova on Sundays, and the wildlife footage looks incredible.
Linear TV over an antenna? Well that’s only technically free. You’d need to buy a receiving device - that costs money. You need to watch ads - that costs time.
If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.
Well considering many paid tiers of streaming services also serve ads, I consider it free-er than that.
Also, most of the hardware is already inside your TV. You just need a $20 antenna.
I have no TV. I watch all my movies and series via a big PC screen which has no TV functionality.
Ah. Well if your PC is static, a USB tuner isn’t too much. Plus then you have a built-in DVR.
I don’t care about cable TV. In Hungary nearly all news broadcasts over here are just propaganda machines and spitting out literal garbage content. Also the ads.
UbO + Internet + torrent goes br
This (applies everywhere). Besides it’s all aimed at boomers and not at all engaging. People who are internet savvy can easily find better free content.
See this is what I’m talking about. Cable is not the same as over the air. I’m not sure how your cable works in Hungary content/pricing-wise, but I do find it funny that a lot of younger people in this thread are lumping the two together.
Im really glad I moved to germany, aside from all my bad experiences there, the whole place was a shithole from the beginning. I just want to See that place burn
What about sports tho?
You can also just pirate
"Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!"
A $10 antenna to watch NFL games is so much more convenient and better quality than any of the pirated streaming options. Broadcast TV trumps Pirating for live shit 100%. Pirate everything else.
Yeah but then you have to watch football. Why go through the suffering? Lol
Ads, ads everywhere.
Besides there, there is also a 4k OTA standard, ATSC 3.0. Most TVs don’t support it yet, but some do. Worth googling before you buy. You can also get something like an silcondust 4k standalone tuner and plug that into your home network instead. You then load its app to watch over the air TV in 4k.
If you do buy the silicondust tuner, you can go further and get a DVR going. Plenty of free projects that will help you setup and record TV like jellyfin, and many of them will auto-skip the ads too with an application called comskip.
Atsc 3.0 requires an internet connection for it’s bullshit DRM
Woww, over the air broadcasts with copy protection? 🤮
It’s like they want OTA TV to die off.
That seems entirely pointless then, why not just stream the content.
Bandwidth is cheaper from the tower since the signal is the “same” for each client and it can then be distributed over a wide area. You send the “DRM” (Just a fancy encryption key) over the network since it’s relatively small and likely unique to each device (probably fingerprinting the device ids to the content invisibily in case of piracy).
Multicast is a thing, though it doesn’t seem to be widespread. That would make a lot more sense than this weird DRM broadcast system.
Multicast still requires more expensive less widespread bandwidth than sending out analog signals ota & shooting off a few packets of encryption information every now and then. US infrastructure has rapidly improved over the past few years, but we’re still a farcry from anything robust and reliable enough to serve the people benefiting from this type of content.
Having the receiver phone home would have the benefit of generating more accurate viewership data, where broadcast tv has historically relied on representative cohorts.
Kodi + Seren + Real Debris Subscription £2 /month. Every show/Movie you would ever want. No need for VPN services.
I love my rabbit ears. Watch local news and the super bowl if I care that year.
You mean OTA TV? I don’t even watch sports, the rest has 10 minute advertisements. And considering it’s digital, I don’t find it interesting at all. Yes, a weird reason, but anyway.
For like $150, you can get a Tablo DVR or similar that records what you want to watch, auto skips the ads, and streams it over WiFi to your phone or laptop. Just leave it on for a year and boom: entire season of whatever show is now yours forever for free.
Just pirate it at that point.
Eh. There’s also the serendipity of it. There’s a half dozen shows that we regularly watch that we only know about because they were randomly on TV.
I think the overlap of tech literacy and nostalgia for a 90s/00s tv feel is quite small. You found your niche though my man, good work.
Or you could just use https://bitsearch.to/and save yourself buying a TV
How do you skip live ads unless you’ve pre-buffered at least 1hr in advance
You don’t, but that only applies to sports or things that you need to watch live.
My mum has a Tivo-like box that allows her to record things and catch up with them later. She still watches all of her series live, so she can gossip with her friends about it the next day. The most useful feature of that setup is that she can pause the show if someone calls her or she needs the toilet, but she wont miss a show that was scheduled for that day
why would I use that when I have a *arr setup?
Removed by mod
Are you talking about the US? You really should be mentioning that
Nice try, Channel Master.
Vaguely aware that’s a thing you can do, but I have no reason to use it as I don’t really watch anything on regular TV anyway
I am curious though, what do you recommend?
YouTube, free broadcasts are on there
Pick up Tablo or HDHomerun. Connect an antenna. Drop it in a closet or wherever you get the best reception. Then just record stuff you like. You can browse from any media streaming box (AppleTV, etc).
There’s decent content in there and after the upfront cost, it’s free.
You get good reception in a closet?
Yes. Radio waves can pierce opaque objects.
